AS before wish I here for the live presentation, have played with several 8051 (when Intel was still doing them, Intel, Phillips, Siemens.. ), 68HC series, and Microchip. Some applications had bot 68HC and Pic parts on the same board.

Good presentation. Catching up on archived lessons. Good vendor support and DEV kits on these processors. I like the PIC family, but also use the 8051 and Atmel processors. Also the Motorola 68K Family of processors did a nice job in their time.

@Bill: The Stellaris driver lib is simpler and easier to use to get fast results. It has excellent documentation. It was the crown jewel they got from Luminary.

Their own Code Composer Studio that works at full capcity on their own Eval Boards ir through an XDS 100 is a great strategy that allows you to test the entire range of capabilities of an MCU. The same IDE works across their entire line from MSP430 to the Full Arm Sitarra/OMAP and DSP as well as the Cortex line. It makes it easy to work with and integrate the various libraries into the IDE environment.

Easiest way to see the difference is to buy a Stellaris LaunchPad -- downlaoad the CCS 5 IDE, install Stellarisware and simply try it out.

The differences in sophistication should be obvious.

The ST Library vs Stellarisware is a Model T vs a well appointed, well maintained Ferrari.

Now if only TI could deliver and MCU with Ethernet that is not NRND...

Thanks, everyone, for the audio file download advice. I've had troubles with the RealDownloader popping up reliably on the audio player section of the web page. I;ll have to try the download helper plugin.

SHeesh: So the model of the dev board is not as important - I have a project with chip on glass display, differnt hardware to talk to our propritary hardware hardware. THe interface I see is the Kiel debug panel.

The front panel is our shipping hardware and we look at the CPU as an interchangable part. (Don't tell the hardware venders - they get testy about this)

I see it as keil - we use that for all inhouse stuff. THe programers view of ST/TI/NXP is all about the same. THe NXP dev board has the best hardware and I can run it to a breadboard with minimal effort.

Harvard is more efficient. Now, if you are going to place lookup tables in Flash, a Harvard architecture might hinder your program. Look for MCUs with special lookup table instructions, or Modified Harvard architectrures.

Also if anybody wants to peek into their favourite micro's insides you can have a look here http://www.flylogic.net/blog/ for decapped micro's images (Atmel http://www.flylogic.net/blog/?cat=2 and microchip http://www.flylogic.net/blog/?cat=1)

@BillGiovino Apart from "Low power" which gets thrown around there is also "Security". There was a very interesting article recently about the Atmel MARC4 here http://adamsblog.aperturelabs.com/2013/01/fun-with-masked-roms.html

What I was getting at is the advantage is development speed during development. I spend my time development and not fighting to get the CPU to do what I want it to do. This for short run products that pushes me to an arm part where it might not make sense from a pure product requirement point of view.

The cost of deveopment can be higher than the BOM of short run products.

It may be possible to do an app in the 8 bit part but the raw power and large registers makes it possible to do prototypeing w/o having to fight with the limits of the CPU. I don't have to worry if the data will fit in the word or messing with multibyte math - it just works.

This is an excellent example of when a 32-bit can be used in an 8-bit socket - more overhead for testing and proto code

@tariq, yes, SoCs and microcontrollers are the same thing. So is ASSP (Application Specific Standard Product). In general, if it's not useful to search the internet for the term, then the term isn't useful. Nobody searches for SoC or ASSP.

It may be possible to do an app in the 8 bit part but the raw power and large registers makes it possible to do prototypeing w/o having to fight with the limits of the CPU. I don't have to worry if the data will fit in the word or messing with multibyte math - it just works.

In your slide you have mentioned about the Set Top Box focus for STMicro. What is special about this chip? Are there any more focussed chips that I have to be concerned about?

That tells you that ST has a large user-base, which cemets their committment to the ARM market. OTOH it also means that if you live near a set-top box manufacturer you may not get the best tech support because the big company is getting the attention you want.

@tariq786 - ARM designs processor cores, and licenses the Intellectual Property of those designs to folks who make devices, those companies on slide 8. Those companies add their peripherals to differentiate their products from others.

MICROCHIP32-bit Answer: For most MCUs, including the 32-bit PIC32 MCUs, you have to have more than one bank of RAM in order to be able to turn unused RAM off. Since the PIC32s currently all have a single bank of RAM, it's not currently possible to turn off any RAM in a PIC32.

16-bit Answer:Microchip does have the ability to selectively power the RAM in sleep with their 16-bit MCUs. This is the difference between the LV-Sleep Mode and the Deep Sleep Mode. This saves a lot of power. LV-Sleep is roughly 300 nA, while Deep Sleep is 10nA with RAM off.

A followup from a question on yesterday about dynamically turning RAM and peripherals on a microcontroller on and off. Microchip and Atmel responded to me:

For both Atmel and Microchip: for peripherals, you can stop the clock to peripherals as well as turn off the power supply to the peripheral.

Atmel RAM: "For ultra low power micros users can normally select if they want to power the entire SRAM or parts of it. This is new technology that is rolling out fast now"

"For peripherals Atmel does clock gating (i.e. remove the clock source to the peripheral) on devices in low leakage processes where switching is the major contributor to power consumption. This includes tinyAVR, megaAVR and AVR XMEGA. For products in denser process geometries where not only switching, but also leakage is a big contributor we have inplemetned power islands for both peripherals and SRAM, example products are SAM7L, UC3L and SAM4L"

fjgalan - I'm not entirely sure what it means, but I think that is your status (iron, gold, etc.). The more you comment/post on our site, the more you move up. For instance, I'm "gold." Hope this helps.

@bitbanger: When I hover over the audio player bar in an archived session, SOMETIMES a RealPlayer popup appears to "download this clip". Also, after right-clicking on the audio player bar, one of the selections is "download this video". (ignore the fact that this is not a video) The audio file is downloaded into the RealPlayer library, which allows you to convert it to an MP3 and/or transfer it into an iPod. At least that is what it claims. I just downloaded the audio from Monday, and converted it to MP3. I have not transferred it into aniPod. Obviously this requires the RealPlayer audio plugin to be the default for your browser.

Is there any way to get an MP3 audio file to download for these archived sessions so they can be hosted onto an iPod or similar audio player? So far using a browser with a live connection seems to be the only supported listening mode.

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